(we)blog

Pages

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Sometimes I think of my Roman Catholic mother attending Easter week
services, during her all-too-brief years with her children. For one who has
moved away from her faith, in my case toward something like pantheism, I wonder
how awkward that topic would be if I could talk to her again now…

I recently read James Michener's The Source, a story of the
Hebrew/Jewish people and their ancestral land that is now Israel. This is an
impressive and gripping work of historical fiction, deeply researched,
published in 1965. In one vignette, a Hebrew tribe marches out of the desert
into Canaan, carrying the invisible yet omnipresent Yahweh in their hearts and
minds. Yahweh commands and prescribes customs, laws, and rituals. Although a
fiction, the portrayed Hebrew beliefs resonate with something I've suspected
for a long time, that the myth of Yahweh was of highest importance, even more
so than the truth of Yahweh. For Yahweh was the deified manifestation of the
Hebrew people. Yahweh was their identity, the face of the collective tribe.

I suspect that this is so throughout most of history, that God is less about
theology and more about identity. An ouroboros of God creating man, and man creating
God.

And this is the source of the discomfort when you say you don’t believe in
someone’s God. You are saying you don’t believe in them. Many who stand in
their faith feel this identification, and this is why denying or challenging their
religion is tantamount to denying their existence.

I do not know if supernatural beings exist, but I do believe in religion as
a cultural identity myth. And there’s that poor bastardized word: myth. If ever
there is a great enemy, as some Christians say, what has happened to that word,
becoming synonymous with a falsehood, would be the greatest of his works. For
it robs us of mystery, story, and meaning. Nothing is more real than that,
transcending even veracity.

If humans are indeed hyperprosocial creatures (see Whip it good), a Being
projected into the sky out of the brains and hearts of a group can have
stupendous polarization power. We don’t eat that or we do wear that or we
whatever because the face in the mirror in the sky says so when we look up
moving our lips in unison as we pray. Behavior guided not by rationality but by
identity preservation. Myths are the scripts that each must play out.

The Jews are a remarkable example of this. Anticipating and adapting to
diaspora, the dense hedge of the Talmud and the rabbinical caste preserved and
protected the Jewish identity through centuries of wandering.

This lack of borders may be a reason why
pantheism is not as appealing as some other beliefs. Everything is on the
inside of God, so where can you point to that which is not self? And without these
lines, what is my identity?

Saturday, October 17, 2015

How Homo sapiens Became the Ultimate Invasive Species, by Curtis Marean.

“Many human species have inhabited Earth. But ours is the only one that colonized the entire planet. A new hypothesis explains why.”

The hypothesis is that an relatively recent evolutionary funnel shaped us to be hyperprosocial creatures, an indomitable force marching out of Africa:

“Everywhere H. sapiens went, massive ecological changes followed. The archaic humans they encountered went extinct, as did vast numbers of animal species. It was, without a doubt, the most consequential migration event in the history of our planet.”

Some threads drawn from and around this:

Our huge energy-hungry brains, and radically differing facial features serve a purpose of forming and managing alliances and identifying insiders and outsiders.

Humans excel at altruism. Also at spite and schadenfreude.

The open hand gesture is a universal sign of peace, yet human hands uniquely and instantly can be weaponized as fists, against which male facial physiognomy is armored.

Hypersociability is Shiva and Brahma, tearing down and building ever higher.

World War I, precipitated by Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, was an astounding and furious alignment of us and them forces. Many historians still do not know how this came about.

“We have met the enemy and they is us.” --Pogo.

It is wise to think before plunging in. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” --Yeats.

Technology fertilizes the growth of institutional golems:

“Feral edifices are awakening on the planet
mosaics made of fragments of frightened people
tribes once profiting by mimicing machines
now caught inside."

Saturday, March 7, 2015

It seems that the days of humanity living in a dream world with myths and stories serving as spiritual guides have passed away. For weal or woe truth is king. Combined with the queasiness of uncertain existence, this can mean latching on to belief for dear life. So if unsubstantiated truth is a requisite of religion, I propose three things to keep the butchery and the bizarre at bay:

Ask science if your truth is healthy. We have bodies and minds that allow science to do this. If believers are pumped full of stress hormones or found in piles at the bottom of ravines then someone should bring this up for discussion.

Rituals and customs are fine for binding the tribe, but at one point in time such things did not exist and there may come a time when they need to go (see #1). Example: animal sacrifice.

If God wants you to do something, let God tell you in person. If there is no message then assume God wants you to figure things out on your own. Never ask someone or something what God wants you to do. We have seen how that plays out time after time. If your holy book has some good advice that stands on its own merits (see #1), then by all means proceed, but that is very different from God telling you personally to do something.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Artificial intelligence doesn't begin with just the brain. Pull back and see an entire creature as a functioning entity. It senses, moves, needs, and interacts with the environment. Animals possess plastic yet durable behaviors that are also modular. Modularity is successful in the hierarchically organized world that we live in. It means re-usability. If a dog learns about eating cake on Tuesday under the porch, another piece of cake on Wednesday behind the house will truly be "a piece of cake"! Hierarchy outside means it must be represented inside. Survival is about using these representations to predict and manipulate the environment. Now look inside the brain and see cells signaling each other, turning each other on and off. Input from sensors and output to motors. Motive to drive the system toward goals that satisfy needs. Memories formed and retained that serve survival. Observe the hierarchical structure of the cortex. The lesson to be taken is that a connectionistic, hierarchical architecture seems to be required. The clay that the system is built out of, and the means by which it comes about, whether by evolution or artifice, will allow for variability of the details.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

This accompanying note says something about how old this is:While waiting around for net.ai to get created, I thoughtI would make a proposal for an alternative to the Turing Testfor intelligence.

It is called the Peanut Butter Test.

The Peanut Butter Test, like the Turing Test, has the drawback/strength of relying on one entity which is assumed to beintelligent to determine whether another entity is intelligent.

However, the Peanut Butter Test, unlike the Turing Test, doesnot rely on a definition of intelligence as being the abilityto successfully mimic an assumed intelligence. Instead, intelligence is defined as the ability to manipulate theenvironment in such a way that a continued desirable interface with the environment is assured. In other words, forces contained in the environment which might disrupt the desirableinterface are anticipated and countered. An entity which cando this successfully in a complex and threatening environmentwould be classified as intelligent. A desirable interfacecould mean anything, but for the Peanut Butter Test, I proposethat it be peanut butter.

As you may begin to guess, a major ingredient to the PeanutButter Test is goals. Goals are the desirable interface.I think peanut butter is a good choice because it is fairlysimple, instead of something like money or happiness, whichno one understands (read, knows how to describe). I personallybelieve that to be intelligent, a thing must be able to learn,and to effectively learn, it must have goals or needs to direct thelearning.

Now, suppose a machine is built, and we want to know if itis intelligent. We give the machine a taste for peanut butter,perhaps by attaching a chemical sensor to it which stimulatesa reinforcement circuit or program whenever peanut butter isdetected by the sensor. It would also make things more interestingif the peanut butter were "consumed" after being sensed, perhapsby arranging the machine to be powered by burning peanut butter,but this is not strictly necessary. Then, we take the machine outinto some fairly interesting and complex environment like thewilds of North Dakota or the wilds of downtown Boston, Mass. andbid it goodbye.

After a period of time, maybe a couple of years, we go and lookup our machine and see how it is doing. If it is still sittingin the same place, with rancid peanut butter stuck on itssensor, then there is not much to conclude. However, if it turnedout that the rain had washed away its initial supply of peanutbutter, and it had gone out in search of more, and in the process of doing that had learned how to speak French, and hadacquired controlling stock in a peanut butter company, and hadacquired several parcels of prime peanut growing land, and wassimply rolling in peanut butter, then we can conclude that ourmachine has gone out and assured itself of a continuous supplyof peanut butter regardless of the vagaries of the environment,and is therefore intelligent.

Monday, August 18, 2014

As a dilettante
philosopher, the subject of free will poses a consternating yet delicious slice
of thought-food. My personal take is that the world doesn’t have much of an
interest in this, although studies show that those who believe they have free
will behave differently from those who think they don’t, regardless of whether
free will can be proven to be so. So society really does have a stake in the
matter.

So recently I started
taking some notes on things that I’ve studied and thought about related to free
will, which is an ancient, universal, and well-trodden topic. What follows are
some of those notes presented in better prose (I hope) than the originals.

We awaken to experience.
We presume that babies are almost nothing but self-centered vortices of
experience. Experiences lead us to what goes up must come down, 2 + 2 = 4, and
to countless cause and effect relationships that just always seem to hold.
There are also universal perceptions of logical laws that ring true in the
mind, like a thing cannot be in two places at once. Early in life, there is also
an inherent acquisition of the concept of self and volition; that we are actors
freely writing our own scripts to play out in the world. These are deeply
embedded in identity.

There is also the knowledge,
pressed home by science, that simple animals with brains made out of the same
substance as ours (but less of it), function like clockworks. Put a certain
stimulus in and here comes a predictable response. These are the sorts of things
that lead one to entertain the strange and disconcerting idea that outside
forces that stamp shapes on the mind are really utterly in control of the mind,
meaning that volition, or free will, is an illusion. So in a way experience has
come around to bite us.

If you are inclined to
hang on to free will, you could adhere to the somewhat solipsistic philosophy
that experience is the primary reality. And you wouldn’t be alone (humor aside). The physicist Erwin Schrödinger, a pioneer of
quantum mechanics, said this about dualism, which is the concept that self and
other are distinct:

"These
shortcomings can hardly be avoided except by abandoning dualism. This has been
proposed often enough, and it is odd that it has usually been done on a
materialistic basis. ....But it strikes me that...surrender of the notion of the real
external world, alien as it seems to everyday thinking, is absolutely essential.”

Speaking of quantum
mechanics, which is physics at a very small scale, the theory says two things
that might be optimistic for free will proponents:

Things are not deterministic
on a small scale. In a sense, outcomes are the result of throws of unknowable
dice.

An “observer”, often
synonymous with an experiencer, can force the dice to be thrown, meaning that
you have some “say” in what happens and that the world may not be such an inexorable
engine after all.

But sadly, if you exist
in the world that deflates things somewhat, since whatever you do as an
observer might be the result of some previous dice throwing.

Can determinism, i.e. no
free will, be proven? If you try to show this by experiment, you need to
separate yourself from the subject in order to control the input and output
variables. The second point above indicates that this might be problematic. But
what is more, there is one experiment that cannot be done, which is proving
that the universe as a whole is deterministic, for two reasons:

Observers by definition
contained within the universe, and thus are part of the experiment.

The results of an
experiment also part of the universe, thus changing the state of it. This means
that experiments on a universal scale are never repeatable.

Pantheists who are
believers that they are part of god-as-universe might find this lack of
provability to be favorable news, whether free will fans or not.

Consider if determinism
were to be proven, it would be an interesting but academic point, as exploiting
that knowledge would of course be coerced by destiny. Predicting some events
might turn out to be less than hoped for as well. For example, suppose the
stock market becomes predictable with a new algorithm. The algorithm will
quickly become part of the stock market, leading down a tail-chasing path that
might be essentially unpredictable.

There is also the cat version
of free will: whatever happens, that's what I meant to happen (from George
Carlin joke about a cat running into a glass door).

Money
almost rivals language as an amazing and ubiquitous invention, or maybe better
put, convention. We have trusted each other with exchanges of shells, salt,
coins, paper, and now ephemeral computer bits. What money you give to me for
what I have or do, I may later give to another in like manner. Liquid value. It
is believed that a currency arises naturally, as a durable, portable, and
universally desired commodity. Gold and silver fit that bill nicely. Chairs and
apples don’t (at least for now). For a long time, however, nations have issued
fiat money, which is backed by trust in the government to honor its value. This
allows government the power to rev and throttle the economy more efficiently as
need arises or, more cynically, as political machinations dictate. In the light
of coming technology, maybe it is time to revisit some old ideas about money.

Money has
become an abstract entity, untethered from material associations. Fortunately,
our brains are fully capable of dealing with abstractions. Or are they?
Abstractions are distillations that have a tendency to lack impact. For
example, numerous studies reveal the limitations of email and texting, forms of
communication that fail to carry visual and audible cues that are present in
the face-to-face encounters that people are so well adapted for. Likewise purely
factual information can fail to convey the emotional and motivational impact of
a topic, which might be hazardous if the topic is wealth.

If we go
back in history, wealth takes on more of a visible, tangible form. For example,
it has taken on the form of crafted artifacts, livestock, or the dimensions of
a dwelling. These are physical commodities. If a rich person has fifty sheep,
there are fifty bleating reminders of that wealth. In societies that use
commodities for money, the wealth of the society is grounded to actual
resources, goods, and services; more so than an abstract currency printed by
governments and doled out by banks. The manifestation of wealth and money in
forms that people can see, touch, and sense, even if indirectly, fits into a
conceptual framework that generally resonates more deeply with people.

Wealth satiation

At this
point, you may think this is an argument for returning to the gold standard or
some commodity currency like it. It is indeed along those lines, but to an even
greater extent only achievable with technology that is arising to implement it.
However, even if it were possible to do this, why dump the fabulously effective
and fluid money that we use today? One reason is to institute a satiation
mechanism for wealth that will curb an appetite which poses a serious threat to
society and the environment.

People
come with satiation mechanisms that tell us when enough is enough. They are
crucial to keeping us healthy and safe. Food is an obvious one. Your stomach
tells you when to start and stop eating in a very convincing fashion. We also
know when to wake up, when to sleep, how many tasks we can manage, how long sporting
events should be, etc. But what about numbers? What number is too big or too
little? It doesn’t make any sense unless you associate something with the number.
When money is only a number, you don’t say to yourself, that is enough, I’m
full now. Numbers do not satiate. So what do people associate with money
numbers? Things like sunny vacations, expensive food and clothes, gleaming
cars, and lavish houses. If you actually had all of these commodities in front
of you or in your portfolio, you might have a better notion of what is enough
and when to slow down. But with pure numbers this is left to flights of
imagination. Adding extra zeros on the end of a number aren’t as easy to
connect to reality as we might think.

“Greed has
no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom,
loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.”

― Erich
Fromm

While the
desire for wealth is the principal driver for capitalism and all of the bounty
that it creates, we can see the excesses that it fosters. Although progress has
been made, the environment continues to be viewed as a resource to be plundered
with little forethought. Deforestation, species extinctions, and global climate
change are a few major casualties. Economically, a strong and invested middle
class, crucial to democracy, shrinks as wealth distribution skews ever more
toward a few at the top. Plutocracy, rule by the rich, is a real danger.

Capitalism
also suffers from never ending speculative bubbles that create false value,
inevitably popping and deflating into recessions. And this happens despite the
best efforts of governments and banks to manage the money supply. Although
these bubbles may be inevitable, the degree and frequency with which they occur
are often related to money that is backed by little but hope. On a darker side,
government manipulation of the money supply allows it to surreptitiously tax citizens
to fund pork projects and war efforts. Unfair trade imbalances have also been
erected by artificially fixing the value of currency. In response to these
forces, and aided by the internet, bartering networks are rising in popularity
as a means of directly exchanging value.

The Internet of Things

The
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a state in which virtually everything is
connected to the internet in some way. Things are tracked as uniquely
identifiable and addressable entities, which in many instances can actively
communicate and respond to stimuli. IoT seems to be coming fast: in the next
few years, six billion objects in the world are predicted to be connected. The
hypothesis presented here is that IoT can be used to overcome the obstacles and
drawbacks for the use of commodity money. For example, gold is a durable, portable,
and universally desired commodity and has served as currency in many societies.
With IoT and the power of electronic commerce, other products and services that
have few of the properties of traditional commodity money might conceivably be
used as such.

As an
example, consider bushels of apples harvested in a distant orchard. The apples have
value relative to other products and services, and may be traded for them. The
owner of the apples, wanting to purchase an item, let us say a chair, could
consign them to a seller in exchange for the chair. In turn, before the apples
spoil, they could be traded for another product or service of value. Since
computing systems know about the apples, where they are, what it would cost to
ship them, and how long they will remain unspoiled, automatic exchanges are made
in the background to shift them into the most profitable position, for example
a local food market. Without intervention, that which an individual owns will
be constantly changing. In this sense, the arenas of commerce and finance would
effectively be merged into a single massive bartering system.

The use of
a just a few commodities as money can lead to unpredictable fluctuations as
supply and demand waxes and wanes. Alternatively, a diversified array of
products and services used as money will be less vulnerable to this type of
destabilization. And unlike a representative substance that is locked up in
vaults, working commodities are valued only for their inherent worth. The
wealth of an individual no longer is an abstract number on a balance sheet; it
is a changing portfolio of products and services. Computers can tell you what
you own in terms of apples or whatever trade commodities you wish to see, but
your wealth will always be grounded in real world entities.

Natural global currency

An
interesting property of IoT money, to give it a name, is that it is by
definition a natural global currency. The gross domestic product of a country
is simply the trade value of its assets. Banks will continue to serve the role
of investment houses, but much less that of money repositories. Governments
will continue to raise taxes, but will have a much reduced role in managing the
money supply, leaving this function to the market. Governments will no longer
be able to artificially manipulate the money supply since that is simply the
current value of goods and services.

If investment
house assets are backed by commodities that can be precisely monitored by
investors, this can serve to suppress risky investment impulses that in the
past have triggered speculative bubbles. Many investors will not want their
wealth loaned out in a risky fashion, or without assurances of getting a
profitable return on investment.

When a
commodity is used as a trade asset, there is a braking force on the overproduction
of the commodity, so as not to excessively devalue it. OPEC oil quotas are an
example. When many commodities are used as money, the braking will apply more extensively,
conserving resources. For example, if fish were used as commodity money, overfishing
will produce wealth and but also decrease the value of each fish. This is the
opposite of the case with abstract money, since the overproduction of wealth
increases the value of money.

For better or worse,
technology is crashing upon us with waves of change. The ways we communicate,
collaborate, and organize ourselves are shifting. It is worth taking a look at
even the most ingrained and cherished conventions to foresee opportunities that
may benefit society. Some decry the greed ethic that propels capitalism, but
there is no doubt that it has raised the standard of living of those adhering
to it. However, like a fire that flares and rages uncontrolled at times,
unbridled greed has left many victims, social and environmental, in its wake. The
speculation here is a possible way to add a moderating governor to the engine
of commerce and finance.